Hazan died in the morning at her home in Florida, according to an email from her son, Giuliano
Hazan, and posts on Facebook and Twitter from her husband and daughter-in-law.

Hazan was best known for her six cookbooks, which were written by her in Italian and translated
into English by Victor, her husband of 57 years. The recipes were traditional, tasty and sparse —
her famous tomato sauce contained only tomatoes, onion, butter and salt (she loved salt) — and
mirrored the tastes of her home country, where importance is placed on the freshness of food rather
than the whiz-bang recipes inside a chef’s mind.

Marcella Pollini was born in 1924 in Cesenatico in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy. She didn’t
intend to be a cooking teacher or author; she graduated from the University of Ferrara with a
doctorate in natural sciences and biology.

But then she met Victor Hazan, who was born in Italy and raised in New York. The couple married
in 1955 and moved to the U.S., and she realized she needed to feed her husband, who longed for the
flavors of Italy. One year, she went to take a Chinese cooking class, but the instructor canceled
the class; the other students decided they wanted Hazan to teach them to cook Italian food.

Those classes blossomed into a lifelong business of teaching.

Hazan gave birth to a son, Giuliano, in 1958. He shared his parents’ love of food and also
became a cookbook author. He also makes frequent visits to the
Today show, teaching his mother’s recipes.

It was Marcella Hazan’s 1973 cookbook,
The Classic Italian Cookbook, that led gourmands to compare Hazan to another
larger-than-life cookbook author: Julia Child.

The two women were longtime friends; Child told
People magazine in 1998 that Hazan was “forbidding because she’s rough … that’s her
manner, and she’s got a good heart.”

In 2000, Hazan was awarded the James Beard Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.

Marcella and Victor Hazan retired to a condo on Longboat Key in the late 1990s.